All Over but the Shoutin' (17 page)

We did a lot of work, for a lot of people, but this was the hardest, the most regular, the dirtiest. We all did it at one time, Sam, me, finally Mark, and we were glad to get it. Our uncle treated us decent, paid on time and bought us, twice a day, an ice-cold RC. The sun burned down on him, too, he just didn’t give a damn. I have known a lot of tough men, men who seemed immune to the elements, even to bullets, but no one ignored the pain like Ed Fair. As a child, his legs had not just been broken but shattered by a speeding car. Yet he worked twelve-hour days on those legs, pieced together with iron rods and fragments of bone, working the pedals of the big tractor, moving mountains, ignoring the pain. It was impossible to whine about the hard work to a man like that. We just did it, every summer, on weekends, after school, if he needed us. We started when we were in junior high, as soon as our momma decided we had sense enough, as soon as we were big enough to realistically do the work.

Our uncle Ed expected us to work as hard as anyone else in the crew, but the fact is he looked after us, trying to make sure we didn’t get hurt. He looked after us in other ways, too.

One summer day, I think we might have been laying sod, I went into a country store to get some cold drinks and other junk food for the crew at lunch. I was covered head to toe in grime and sweat. For some reason, maybe because I didn’t have enough money, maybe because I had forgotten what I was supposed to get, I had to turn around and go out again, and when I got back inside the store the man behind the cash register was glaring at me. “You gonna pay for the Coke you stole,” he said. There were other people in the store, and they stared at me.

I told him I didn’t steal anything. Then my uncle Ed, wondering why I was taking so long, walked in the door. He faced down the man, and I had little doubt he would have fought him right then and there.

“I know the boy. I helped raise him. The boy don’t steal,” he said. “He don’t have to steal, if he wants a cold drink. I got enough money in my back pocket to buy your whole damn store.” Then he walked out, me in tow, leaving the man red-faced and shamed behind the front counter. I hope he realizes how close he came to getting a no. 9 work boot up his behind, one with a built-up heel, to compensate for Uncle Ed’s worst bad leg.

I appreciated the work, but I dreaded it. I dreaded the last day of class, the beginning of summer vacation. The next morning our momma would wake us up, feed us a biscuit and some fried eggs and hand us a brown-paper bag that contained two skinny, white-bread, potted meat sandwiches—a pink paste made from ground pork and preservatives—and a cookie. She never sent chocolate. Chocolate melted to mush in the cab of the dump trucks, and you had to lick it off the wrapper. You rode to the job in an insidious mix of diesel fumes and gray cigarette smoke, the big trucks moaning, bouncing, jerking along the roads, and before you had done even a lick of work you were wishing the day was over, the sun was down.

If we were clearing a lot that day, we followed the bulldozer into the pines and, with chain saws that vibrated so hard you had to be careful to keep your tongue out from between your clicking teeth, we chopped up the trees that the machine pushed down. Then the work really started. The logs were cut in six-feet lengths—the only way they could be sold as pulpwood—and we had to heave them over the side of the dump trucks, which stood about eight feet high. Some of the logs weighed fifty pounds and some weighed two hundred. Sometimes, all you could do was get one end of the log over the side of the truck and try to shove the rest of it over, trying to keep it from knocking your teeth out if you failed and it fell back down on you. The sap, sticky as gum, coated your arms and face and the chips of bark gored into your eyes, and every step you made you expected to feel the needle-sharp fangs of a copperhead or rattlesnake sink into your calf, because there was no way to tell where you put your feet in that tangle of broken limbs.

But the worst of it was when we had to get a house ready for its yard, which meant every rock and root and clod of hard mud had to be dug, picked or raked away, and piled in mounds for “the trash man.” Sam and I were the trash men, because we were always the youngest in the crew. We used giant forks, half as tall as us, big enough to hold forty pounds, to shovel the trash up and heave it, over our shoulder, into the back of the dump truck. Sometimes we couldn’t get the truck between the trees—some yuppie was always afraid of getting a dogwood scratched—and we would load it into a wheelbarrow and, straining our guts out, push it up a two-by-eight onto the back of the flatbed truck, and dump it.

“Someday, you gonna get a good job,” my uncle Ed told me. “You ought to take that fork and hang it on the wall, so you’ll remember what this was like. You’ll never gripe about that good job. You never will.”

I knew this was not forever. It was the just the way, the means, by which we had things. Sam had caught the worst of it; I guess the oldest, by nature, always do. He worked, as a boy of twelve and thirteen, to help our momma, for nickels and dimes and quarters, trading his labor for a pickup load of coal. He would help a man cut hogs—the bloody castrating and nose-ringing work—for meat. By the time he was fifteen, his arms were corded with muscle, his legs hard as a pine knot. I saw him as indestructible, so much so that, one time when he accidentally ripped into his leg with the power saw, I was surprised to see him bleed.

The work was a hard and temporary thing that, I hoped, would pass in time. For me, it was a purification by fire, a thing that would make every other job, every other thing I ever did for the rest of my life, so laughingly easy by comparison.

For Sam, it was the first step in a long, long walk, where the scenery seldom changed.

R
oy Webb Junior High School is a red-brick, one-story building on Roy Webb Road, and sits in the middle of the Roy Webb Community. I never bothered to ask who Roy Webb was, but if modesty was one of his virtues in life, he is twirling ’neath the red clay now. There were a few rich kids, but most of the children were the sons and daughters of working people. Even within a society like that, there are classes. I remember, when I was in the elementary school, having to answer questions about why we lived in our grandmother’s house. The word spread. “They ain’t got no daddy.”

The principal and teachers, when they recognized who we were, where we ranked, told Sam that he could sweep the narrow halls, clean the bathrooms and shovel coal into the school’s furnace, to earn his free lunch. He took out the trash and burned it and unclogged the toilet. They never bothered to teach him to read very well; he learned that on his own. They never bothered to tell him about the world outside his narrow, limited one. They forgot to show him maps of the universe or share the secrets of history, biology. As other students behind the classroom doors read about about empires, wars and kings, he waxed the gymnasium floor.

12
Getting above your raisin

M
y momma did not lecture much, but when she did it was about false pride. My daddy had it. It was what made him sit for hours and shine his shoes or sharpen his knife, and forget to care about things that were really important, like whether his wife had money for groceries. She said, now and then, that I had my daddy’s pride. I cared too much about appearances, about the façade that faced the rest of the world. I would have paid more attention to her if I had not known for some time that it was precisely that same kind of pride that kept her a prisoner in that little house. But I guess being a momma has little to do with logic.

The really sad thing is that I let that false pride—that pride, and a fourteen-year-old girl—make me ashamed of who I was. Worse, I let it make me ashamed of who my momma was.

It was the summer before I started high school, and even though I had long since discovered the differences in my family and others, no one had ever put it into words, until her.

I was, in my own mind, a dashing figure. I had played on the basketball and baseball teams and I owned a motorcycle, a white-and-red Honda. The chain was prone to come off at high speed, locking up the rear wheel at sixty miles per hour, but it was still a motorcycle, paid for with money I earned working for my uncle Ed.

The girl was my first steady one. She was tall, taller than most of the boys, with wavy brown hair, a vision in cut-off blue jeans and a T-shirt tied in a knot around her waist. She was a cheerleader, made all A’s, went to church every Sunday and liked to talk about going to college.

She was the daughter of a respected family in the small community where I went to school, which was not—by luck—the one where I lived. She did not know anything about me, beyond what I told her. I did not invent a life, did not concoct a more respectable history. I would not have sunk that low. Instead, I told her nothing about my background. We sat in a swing in her backyard and talked and talked about everything except me, and I thought I was safe.

Then one day there was a knock on my door. It was her, flanked by a covey of her girlfriends. They had gone to the nearby Germania Springs for a picnic, and came to see if I wanted to go.

I will never forget the look on their faces as they took in the tiny living room with its ripped Naugahyde couch and the worn-out rug and the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

And I saw the way they looked at my momma, in her flip-flops and old pants cut off at the knee. I told them I had to work.

A few days later she told me that we had to break up. She said we were too different. I asked her what she meant and she said it was because I was poor and she was not. It never would work, she said. She made it seem like we were grownups, instead of fourteen. She made it sound like she was the lady of the manor lamenting her romance with the garbage man.

I should have told her to go to hell. Instead, I just said, “You might be right,” and rode away on my motorcycle, noble.

I knew then there was no use in pretending, in hiding. I was still ashamed, but from that moment on I wore my poverty like a suit of mail. I brought my girlfriends home, and if I saw that look, that horror in their eyes, I took them back to their house and never came back. It, the look, was almost always there. It never even occurred to me that I was destined to lose. The only girls I had any interest in were the ones who represented the world I wanted to be a part of, the ones above my station, and in my part of the world class is damn near as strong as color. Luckily, a few of them liked slumming. They liked being on back of that motorcycle, being free of respectability, for a while. That was enough, then. Someone else could take them to the big dance. I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind.

My momma just kept trying, just kept pulling.

My favorite Bible story is of the widow’s mite, of the poor woman who gave two small coins to the Temple. Rich merchants gave much more in tribute, but God saw her gift as greater because it was everything she had. So God blessed her.

13
Fine qualities

W
hen he died, I don’t remember any grief. It would have been artificial to grieve, like bending over plastic flowers laid at a gravesite, and expecting to smell their scent.

You never know how brave you will be when you die. You may cry and you may cuss. You may shake your fist at God, or, with the last ounce of energy in your body, try to steeple your fingers. But I know one thing: when I see it coming, if I see it, I will not reach out to the people I hurt in life, and ask them to care. It is not that I will be so noble, so considerate. It is only that I would be afraid they would react in the same way I did, at the end of my father’s life. That I could not stand.

My daddy had been sick for a long, long time by my fifteenth birthday, and by the time I entered high school, in the fall of 1974, he was near death. He sat in that little house and coughed out his life, day after miserable day, getting weaker, becoming more afraid, searching for God with no experience.

We dreaded the phone calls. We had just gotten a telephone of our own, and we should have been enthralled by it, should have run to answer it. Instead, when it rang we just stared at it, as if death itself was on the other end, and in a way it was. We just stared at it until our momma picked it up, and listened, without speaking, to his fears. Sometimes she would just dip her head and close her eyes and sit, not moving, and I knew she was praying with him.

There is little more to say about my last visit to him, that day he gave me the precious books and the new rifle and told me the stories of his war. Except maybe this: if it had never happened, if he had not bothered to tell me, then I would have hated him until my final breath. Instead, when his suffering was finally done, I truly did not know what to feel. But I know it was not hate. I know hate. There is nothing remotely like hate.

He died on January 29, 1975. He was forty-one. He was sober, I believe.

We did not go to his funeral, but Momma thought it was fitting that we at least go look at him in the funeral home. She laid clothes out for us on the bed, but Sam refused to go. In one of those few times in my life when I intentionally sided against her, with anyone, I said I would not go either. Maybe I was trying to repay Sam for that time he hurled himself at my father, to protect me. To Mark, he was a stranger. His death meant nothing. We all stayed home.

Momma went by herself. She didn’t stay long, just long enough to pay her respects to my granny Bragg, and look one last time at his face. I never asked her what she saw or what she felt. That is between them.

Many years later, a man who had known him all his life, longer and better than me, said this: “If you took away the likker, Charles had some fine qualities.” I told him I appreciated him saying that. I would like to believe it. I would have liked to have met him when he was a boy, before time had mutilated him so.

I wonder, sometimes, if I would have seen anything of myself in him, in his face, in his mannerisms. I have been told, now and then, that I got some of my character from him, but it was mostly bad things. Anger comes quick to me, like him. Forgiveness comes slow or not at all, like him. I rage against things I cannot change, and let things I could affect, I could change, just slide. As he had.